Aspirations for emancipation and secularization have all kinds of consequences, which may be sometimes undesirable, that is clearly true, but should we than conclude that we should not try and emancipate people from the received truth as it is imposed by priests wherever they are? No, it does not mean that!

Stop thinking of this country as the sole superpower or the indispensable nation on Earth and start reimagining it as the great fracturer, the exceptional smasher, the indispensable fragmenter. Its wars of the twenty-first century are starting to come home big time — home being not just this particular country (though that’s true, too) but this planet. Though hardly alone, the U.S. is, for the moment, the most exceptional home-destroyer around and its president is now not just the commander-in-chief but the home-smasher-in-chief.

Just this week, for instance, home smashing was in the headlines. After all, the Islamic State’s ‘capital,’ the city of Raqqa, was ‘liberated.’ We won! The U.S. and the forces it backed in Syria were finally victorious and the brutal Islamic State (a home-smashing movement that emerged from an American military prison in Iraq) was finally driven from that city (almost!). And oh yes, according to witnesses, the former city of 300,000 lies abandoned with hardly a building left undamaged, unbroken, un-smashed. Over these last months, the American bombing campaign against Raqqa and the artillery support that went with it reportedly killed more than 1,000 civilians and turned significant parts of the city into rubble — and what that didn’t do, ISIS bombs and other munitions did. (According to estimates, they could take years to find and remove.) And Raqqa is just the latest Middle Eastern city to be smashed more or less to bits.

What was the nature of Goya’s commentary? For despite the variety of the incidents portrayed, there is a constant underlying theme. His theme was the consequences of Man’s neglect — sometimes mounting to hysterical hatred — of his most precious faculty, Reason…

The unique power of his work is due to the fact that he was so sensuously involved in the terror and horror of the betrayal of Reason…

A monk undresses in a brothel and Goya draws him, hating him, not in any way because he himself is a puritan, but because he senses that the same impulses that are behind this incident will lead in the Disasters of War to soldiers castrating a peasant and raping his wife. The huge brutal heads he put on hunchback bodies, the animals he dressed up in official robes of office, the way he gave to the cross-hatched tone on a human body the filthy implication of fur, the rage with which he drew witches — all these were protests against the abuse of human possibilities.

And what makes Goya’s protests so desperately relevant for us, after Buchenwald and Hiroshima, is that he knew that when corruption goes far enough, when the human possibilities are denied with sufficient ruthlessness, both ravager and victim are made bestial…

The intention of his work was highly objective and social. His theme was what man was capable of doing to man. Most of his subjects involve action between figures. But even when the figures are single — a girl in prison, an habitual lecher, a beggar who was once ‘somebody’ — the implication, often actually stated in the title, is ‘Look what has been done to them.’

From the individual's standpoint, much that happens seems the result of manipulation, of management, of blind drift; authority is often not explicit; those with power often feel no need to make it explicit and to justify it. That is one reason why ordinary men, when they are in trouble or when they sense that they are up against issues, cannot get clear targets for thought and for action; they cannot determine what it is that imperils the values they vaguely discern as theirs.

Given these effects of the ascendant trend of rationalization, the individual 'does the best he can.' He gears his aspirations and his work to the situation he is in, and from which he can find no way out. In due course, he does not seek a way out: he adapts. That part of his life which is left over from work, he uses to play, to consume, 'to have fun.' Yet this sphere of consumption is also being rationalized. Alienated from production, from work, he is also alienated from consumption, from genuine leisure. This adaptation of the individual and its effects upon his milieu and self results not only in the loss of his chance, and in due course, of his capacity and will to reason; it also affects his chances and his capacity to act as a free man. Indeed, neither the value of freedom nor of reason, it would seem, are known to him.

Such adapted men are not necessarily unintelligent, even after they have lived and worked and played in such circumstances for quite some time. Karl Mannheim has made the point in a clear way by speaking of 'self rationalization,' which refers to the way in which an individual, caught in the limited segments of great, rational organizations, comes systematically to regulate his impulses and his aspirations, his manner of life and his ways of thought, in rather strict accordance with 'the rules and regulations of the organization.' The rational organization is thus an alienating organization: the guiding principles of conduct and reflection, and in due course of emotion as well, are not seated in the individual conscience of the Reformation man, or in the independent reason of the Cartesian man. The guiding principles, in fact, are alien to and in contradiction with all that has been historically understood as individuality. It is not too much to say that in the extreme development the chance to reason of most men is destroyed, as rationality increases and its locus, its control, is moved from the individual to the big-scale organization. There is then rationality without reason. Such rationality is not commensurate with freedom but the destroyer of it.

It is no wonder that the ideal of individuality has become moot: in our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature. We do not know how profound man's psychological transformation from the Modem Age to the contemporary epoch may be. But we must now raise the question in an ultimate form: Among contemporary men will there come to prevail, or even to flourish, what may be called The Cheerful Robot?

We know of course that man can be turned into a robot, by chemical and psychiatric means, by steady coercion and by controlled environment; but also by random pressures and unplanned sequences of circumstances. But can he be made to want to become a cheerful and willing robot? Can he be happy in this condition, and what are the qualities and the meanings of such happiness? It will no longer do merely to assume, as a metaphysic of human nature, that down deep in man-as-man there is an urge for freedom and a will to reason. Now we must ask: What in man's nature, what in the human condition today, what in each of the varieties of social structure makes for the ascendancy of the cheerful robot? And what stands against it?

The advent of the alienated man and all the themes which lie behind his advent now affect the whole of our serious intellectual life and cause our immediate intellectual malaise. It is a major theme of the human condition in the contemporary epoch and of all studies worthy of the name. I know of no idea, no theme, no problem, that is so deep in the classic tradition— and so much involved in the possible default of contemporary social science.

It is what Karl Marx so brilliantly discerned in his earlier essays on 'alienation'; it is the chief concern of Georg Simmel in his justly famous essay on 'The Metropolis'; Graham Wallas was aware of it in his work on The Great Society. It lies behind Fromm's conception of the 'automaton.' The fear that such a type of man will become ascendant underlies many of the more recent uses of such classic sociological conceptions as 'status and contract,' 'community and society.' It is the hard meaning of such notions as Riesman's 'other-directed' and Whyte's 'social ethic.' And of course, most popularly, the triumph — if it may be called that — of such a man is the key meaning of George Orwell's 1984…

The society in which this man, this cheerful robot, flourishes is the antithesis of the free society — or in the literal and plain meaning of the word, of a democratic society. The advent of this man points to freedom as trouble, as issue, and — let us hope — as problem for social scientists. Put as a trouble of the individual — of the terms and values of which he is uneasily unaware — it is the trouble called 'alienation.' As an issue for publics… it is no less than the issue of democratic society, as fact and as aspiration…

[T]he issue to which modern threats to freedom and reason most typically lead is, above all, the absence of explicit issues — to apathy rather than to issues explicitly defined as such. The issues and troubles have not been clarified because the chief capacities and qualities of man required to clarify them are the very freedom and reason that are threatened and dwindling. Neither the troubles nor the issues have been seriously formulated as the problems of the kinds of social science I have been criticizing in this book.

We live in a world of forced Enlightenment, where all notions have fallen by the wayside, like the idea of a well-educated citizenry, when in reality you have mass-media spreading false news, fake news, propaganda all the time. And than there are the social media; you have so many forces acting on the individual mind, so this project of individual reason, individual autonomy is in danger as never before. It is in this context that you can persuade people that it is the politicians who are responsible for your plight, that they don’t care about you, but only care about themselves.

Onmiddellijk reageerde Buruma verontwaardigd door te stellen: ’maar dat zeg jij ook, dus ben je het eens met de mensen die de kosmopolitische elites verwijten dat zij alleen voor zichzelf zorgen.’ Deze reactie ontmaskerde niet zijn opponent, maar Buruma zelf, omdat door zijn beschuldiging duidelijk werd dat hij de analyse van intellectuelen als Mishra verafschuwt. Die weerzin is begrijpelijk omdat Mishra zijn pijlen niet alleen richt op de neoconservatieven, maar ook op zogeheten ‘liberals’ als Buruma. Mishra’s woorden toonde dit opnieuw aan. Hij zei dat beide partijen ‘have to recognize that there is a lot of truth’ in de beschuldigingen van burgers aan het adres van de elite en haar opiniemakers in de mainstream-journalistiek. ‘These elites,’ bestaan nu eenmaal en zijn ‘vooralgecreëerd’ in ‘the last three decades of rapid globalization. These are facts that everyone knows, there is no doubt that globalization benefited largely this tiny minority, helps the rich get much richer, that social mobility is blocked for many people, that the United States is one of the most unequal countries in the world today, and that the people who benefited are those who managed to connect themselves to global processes. There is a lot of truth in this complaint, and this is where demagogues essentially reap their harvest. There is in the lived experience of many people, much actual truth that they are being served a very seductive cocktail,’ gemengd ‘with falsehoods. There is much truth’ in het feit dat de huidige ‘inequality is really, really obsceen, especially in Britain and the United States.’

the aspirations towards more individual liberty, secularization, less dependence on revealed truth and all the rest of it, have had such undesirable results, what alternative would you propose? Because, one alternative is indeed a sort of traditionalist rhetoric, in for instance China reintroducing Confucianisme, or at its crudest, as sort of: Make America Great Again! How do you see that, what kind of politics do you propose as an alternative for the aspiration to the aspiration towards more individual liberty and more democracy?

with the victory (van het geglobaliseerde neoliberalisme. svh)it has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm, first explored by Rousseau, between an elite that seizes modernity choicest fruits while disdaining older truths, and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism (het wereldbeeld dat een bepaald ras, etniciteit, religie, sociale klasse, natie, of cultuur superieur is. svh) populism and rancorous brutality. The contradictions and costs of a minority’s progress, long suppressed by historical revisionism, blustery (snoeverige. svh) denial and agressie equivocation, have become visible on a planetary scale.

They encourage the suspicion — potentially lethal among the hundreds of millions people condemned to superfluousness (overbodigheid. svh) — that the present order, democratic or authoritarian, is built upon force and fraud; they incite a broader and more apocalyptic mood than we have witnessed before. They also underscore the need for some truly transformative thinking, about both the self and the world,

I honestly want to diagnose the problem correctly. What I am saying is that the idea’s (de verlichtingsidealen. svh) which were proposed by a tiny minority for itself, and became attached to all kinds of different processes in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and, mostly, in the last few decades. But there is not a true line between the ideas of the Enlightenment and the present. What we see are different periodes, in which this modern project of emancipation assumes different forms, which is not to say that the modern project of emancipation should be abandoned, but the challenge is to make it available for people for whom it was not originally meant,

When you are asking me to propose a solution you basically ask fish in the water: is there any other place where one can swim? This is the world we live in, created by western science, where is the alternative? What can be the alternative? Can fish climb out of the water?

In the early 19th century, through his conquests in Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte spread the modernist ideas of revolutionary France: equality of citizens and the rule of law. Napoleon's personal attitude towards the Jews has been interpreted in various ways by different historians, as at various times he made statements both in support and opposition to the Jewish people. Historian Rabbi Berel Wein in Triumph of Survival: The Story of the Jews in the Modern Era 1650-1990 (1990) claims that Napoleon was interested primarily in seeing the Jews assimilate, rather than prosper as a distinct community: ‘Napoleon's outward tolerance and fairness toward Jews was actually based upon his grand plan to have them disappear entirely by means of total assimilation, intermarriage, and conversion.’

Napoleon was concerned about the role of Jews as money lenders, wanting to end that. The treatment of the Alsace Jews and their debtors was raised in the Imperial Council on 30 April 1806. His liberation of the Jewish communities in Italy (notably in Ancona in the Papal States) and his insistence on the integration of Jews as equals in French and Italian societies demonstrate that he distinguished between usurers (whether Jewish or not), whom he compared to locusts, and Jews who accepted non-Jews as their equals.

His letter to Champagny, Minister of the Interior of 29 November 1806, expresses his thoughts:

‘[It is necessary to] reduce, if not destroy, the tendency of Jewish people to practice a very great number of activities that are harmful to civilization and to public order in society in all the countries of the world. It is necessary to stop the harm by preventing it; to prevent it, it is necessary to change the Jews. [...] Once part of their youth will take its place in our armies, they will cease to have Jewish interests and sentiments; their interests and sentiments will be French.’

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has claimed that criticism of Saudi Arabia in Parliament is hindering Britain’s ability to secure sales of fighter jets to the oil-rich kingdom…

His comments were immediately seized upon by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) who branded Mr Fallon’s warning to colleagues as ‘disgraceful.’

‘He is calling on other parliamentarians to join him in putting arms sales ahead of human rights, democracy and international humanitarian law,’ said Andrew Smith.

‘Arms sales to human rights abusing regimes like Saudi Arabia would not be possible without the support of Ministers like Fallon. If the Government’s main concern is jobs then it should be shifting that support into more positive areas like renewable energy and low carbon technology, and other industries which are not dependent on war and conflict for profit.’

I think that Napoleon is an interesting thing to talk about because, yes, a lot of people were killed as a consequence of his military campaigns, but his brand of universalism is actually something we — in this country as well as other countries — still benefit from, the idea of equality for the law and so on, did come from them (Napoleon en de Verlichtingsideologen. svh), the emancipation of minorities came from them, precisely because he had the idea of the universality of rights, and that not just one particular elite or one particular people deserved rights, but that it were universal rights.

In response, Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched a large expeditionary force of French soldiers and warships to the island, led by Bonaparte's brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, to restore French rule. They were under secret instructions to restore slavery, at least in the formerly Spanish-held part of the island. Bonaparte ordered that Toussaint was to be treated with respect until the French forces were established; once that was done, Toussaint was to summoned to Le Cap and be arrested; if he failed to show, Leclerc was to wage ‘a war to the death’ with no mercy and all of Toussaint's followers to be shot when captured. Once that was completed, slavery would be ultimately restored…

The French arrived at on 2 February 1802 at Le Cap with the Haitian commander Henri Christophe being ordered by Leclerc to turn over the city to the French. When Christophe refused, the French assaulted Le Cap and the Haitians set the city afire rather than surrender it. Leclerc sent Toussaint letters promising him: ‘Have no worries about your personal fortune. It will be safeguarded for you, since it has been only too well earned by your own efforts. Do not worry about the liberty of your fellow citizens.’ When Toussaint still failed to appear at Le Cap, Leclerc issued a proclamation on 17 February 1802: ‘General Toussaint and General Christophe are outlawed; all citizens are ordered to hunt them down, and treat them as rebels against the French Republic.’

it became apparent that the French intended to re-establish slavery (because they had nearly done so on Guadeloupe), black cultivators revolted in the summer of 1802. Yellow fever had decimated the French as by the middle of July 1802, the French lost about 10, 000 dead to yellow fever. By September, Leclerc wrote in his diary that he had only 8, 000 fit men left as yellow fever had killed the others.[106] Many of the ‘French’ soldiers were actually Polish as 5, 000 Poles were serving in two demi-brigades in the French Army. Many Poles believed that if they fought for France, Bonaparte would reward them by restoring Polish independence, which had been ended with the Third Partition of Poland in 1795. Of the 5, 000 Poles, about 4, 000 were to die of yellow fever. A French planter wrote of the Polish soldiers: ‘Ten days after the landing of these two beautiful regiments, more than half their number were carried off by yellow fever; they fell down as they walked, the blood rushing out through their nostrils, mouths, eyes… what a horrible and heart-rending sight!’ Sometimes, the Poles died in battle. At a battle at Port Sault, the Polish Third Battalion fought about 200 Haitians who ambushed them with musket fire and by pushing boulders down on them. One historian noted that ‘the Poles, rather than spreading out, each man for himself, slowly advanced in a tightly packed mass which afford an ideal target for the well-protected insurgent rifleman.’ Most of the Poles were cut down by the Haitians, which led Rochambeau to remark that one could always count on the Poles to die without flinching in battle. Some of the Poles came to believe that they were fighting on the wrong side, as they had joined the French Army to fight for freedom, not impose slavery, and they defected to join the Haitians.

What is needed, then, is ‘a new concept of identity.’ Perhaps so, but Maalouf is a little vague about what that concept might be. It should be mixed, and never absolute. We should feel part of our countries, and of ‘Europe,’ or even the world. Religion must be personal and ‘kept apart from what has to do with identity.’ I’m not sure all this is possible.

Maalouf may be too optimistic when he claims that people with multiple identities will never be ‘on the side of the fanatics.’ On the contrary, purity is often the compulsive aim of those who feel they have to make up for their complexity.

in the age of globalization and of the ever-accelerating intermingling of elements in which we are all caught up, a new concept of identity is needed, and needed urgently. We cannot be satisfied with forcing billions of bewildered human beings to choose between excessive assertion of their identity altogether, between fundamentalism and disintegration. But that is the logical consequence of the prevailing attitude on the subject. If our contemporaries are not encouraged to accept their multiple affiliations and allegiances; if they cannot reconcile their need for identity with an open and unprejudiced tolerance of other cultures ; if they feel they have to choose between denial of the self and denial of the other — then we shall be bringing into being legions of the lost and hordes of bloodthirsty madmen.

But let us return for a moment to some examples I quoted at the beginning of this book. A man with a Serbian mother and a Croatian father, and who manages to accept his dual affiliation, will never take part in any form of ethnic ‘cleansing.’ A man with a Hutu mother and a Tutsi father, if he can accept the two ‘tributaries’ that brought him into the world, will never be a party to butchery or genocide. And neither the Franco-Algerian lad, nor the young man of mixed German and Turkish origin whom I mentioned earlier, will ever be on the side of the fanatics if they succeed in living peacefully in the context of their own complex identity.

Here again it would be a mistake to see such examples as extreme or unusual. Wherever there are groups human beings living side by side who differ from one another in religion, colour, language, ethnic origin or nationality; wherever there are tensions, more or less longstanding, more or less violent, between immigrants and local populations, Blacks and Whites, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Arabs, hindus and Sikhs, Lithuanians and Russians, Serbs and Albanians, Greeks and Turks, English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians, Flemings and Walloons, Chinese and Malays — yes, wherever there is a divided society, there are men and women bearing within them contradictory allegiances, people who live on the frontier between opposed communities, and whose very being might be said to be traversed by ethnic or religious or other fault lines.

We are not dealing with a handful of marginal people. There are thousands, millions of such men and women, and there will be more and more to them. They are frontier-dwellers by choice, or through the changes and chances of life, or by deliberate choice, and they can influence events and affect their course one way or the other. Those who can accept their diversity fully will hand on the torch between communities and cultures, will be a kind of mortar joining together and strengthening he societies in which they live. On the other hand, those who cannot accept their own diversity may be among the most virulent of those prepared to kill for the sake of identity, attacking those who embody that part pof themselves which they would like to see forgotten. History contains many examples of such self-hatred.

Opinion, in a highly commercialized society, becomes a sign of class. It is chic to disapprove of America, not only of its rulers or those who elect them, but of the idea of America itself. What Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and Tariq Ali have in common, then, is snobbery apart from anything else.

brand of universalism is actually something we — in this country as well as other countries — still benefit from, the idea of equality for the law and so on, did come from them (Napoleon en de Verlichtingsideologen. svh), the emancipation of minorities came from them, precisely because he had the idea of the universality of rights, and that not just one particular elite or one particular people deserved rights, but that it were universal rights,

The United States and the Haitian Revolution, 1791–1804

The Haitian Revolution created the second independent country in the Americas after the United States became independent in 1783. U.S. political leaders, many of them slaveowners, reacted to the emergence of Haiti as a state borne out of a slave revolt with ambivalence, at times providing aid to put down the revolt, and, later in the revolution, providing support to Toussaint L’Ouverture’s forces. Due to these shifts in policy and domestic concerns, the United States would not officially recognize Haitian independence until 1862.

Prior to its independence, Haiti was a French colony known as St. Domingue. St. Domingue’s slave-based sugar and coffee industries had been fast-growing and successful, and by the 1760s it had become the most profitable colony in the Americas. With the economic growth, however, came increasing exploitation of the African slaves who made up the overwhelming majority of the population. Prior to and after U.S. independence, American merchants enjoyed a healthy trade with St. Domingue.

The French Revolution had a great impact on the colony. St. Domingue’s white minority split into Royalist and Revolutionary factions, while the mixed-race population campaigned for civil rights. Sensing an opportunity, the slaves of northern St. Domingue organized and planned a massive rebellion which began on August 22, 1791.

When news of the slave revolt broke out, American leaders rushed to provide support for the whites of St. Domingue. However, the situation became more complex when civil commissioners sent to St. Domingue by the French revolutionary government convinced one of the slave revolt leaders, Toussaint L’Ouverture, that the new French Government was committed to ending slavery. What followed over the next decade was a complex and multi-sided civil war in which Spanish and British forces also intervened.

The situation in St. Domingue put the Democratic-Republican party and its leader, Thomas Jefferson, in somewhat of a political dilemma. Jefferson believed strongly in the French Revolution and the ideals it promoted, but as a Virginia slaveholder popular among other Virginia slaveholders, Jefferson also feared the specter of slave revolt. When faced with the question of what the United States should do about the French colony of St. Domingue, Jefferson favored offering limited aid to suppress the revolt, but also suggested that the slaveowners should aim for a compromise similar to that Jamaican slaveholders made with communities of escaped slaves in 1739. Despite their numerous differences on other issues, Secretary of the Treasury and leader of the rival Federalist Party Alexander Hamilton largely agreed with Jefferson regarding Haiti policy.

The Haitian revolution came to North American shores in the form of a refugee crisis. In 1793, competing factions battled for control of the then-capital of St. Domingue, Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien.) The fighting and ensuing fire destroyed much of the capital, and refugees piled into ships anchored in the harbor. The French navy deposited the refugees in Norfolk, Virginia. Many refugees also settled in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. These refugees were predominantly white, though many had brought their slaves with them. The refugees became involved in émigré politics, hoping to influence U.S. foreign policy. Anxieties about their actions, along with those of European radicals also residing in the United States, led to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The growing xenophobia, along with temporarily improved political stability in France and St. Domingue, convinced many of the refugees to return home.

The beginning of the Federalist administration of President John Adams signaled a change in policy. Adams was resolutely anti-slavery and felt no need to aid white forces in St. Domingue. He was also concerned that L’Ouverture would choose to pursue a policy of state-supported piracy like that of the Barbary States. Lastly, St. Domingue’s trade had partially rebounded, and Adams wished to preserve trade links with the colony. Consequently, Adams decided to provide aid to L’Ouverture against his British-supported rivals. This situation was complicated by the Quasi-War with France—L’Ouverture continued to insist that St. Domingue was a French colony even as he pursued an independent foreign policy.

Under President Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the United States cut off aid to L’Ouverture and instead pursued a policy to isolate Haiti, fearing that the Haitian revolution would spread to the United States. These concerns were in fact unfounded, as the fledgling Haitian state was more concerned with its own survival than with exporting revolution. Nevertheless, Jefferson grew even more hostile after L’Ouverture’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, ordered the execution of whites remaining after the Napoleonic attempts to reconquer St. Domingue and reimpose slavery (French defeat led to the Louisiana Purchase.) Jefferson refused to recognize Haitian independence, a policy to which U.S. Federalists also acquiesced. Although France recognized Haitian independence in 1825, Haitians would have to wait until 1862 for the United States to recognize Haiti’s status as a sovereign, independent nation.